Oracle Blog

Wednesday Oct 30, 2013

Here is another great YouTube video by our product manager
Monica Riccelli. She talks about installers now being standardized in Oracle
for greater consistency -- no more WebLogic native installers. Also, JDK is no
longer a part of the WebLogic install. The
various installers she discusses include OUI, ZIP, OEPE, Coherence and more.
Monica then takes us through a step by step install process.

After the install process is complete the
video takes us through the configuration wizard. The ZIP installer is then discussed
and its effectiveness, such as it being the smallest downloadable option, easy, and
very popular with our customers and limitations (such as for development only
and not to be used in production) highlighted. Monica then takes us through the
configuration wizard, its usage, and when to use WLST scripts. The video then
discusses NodeManager and its usage and discusses how to reconfigure a WebLogic
domain on upgrade – through our GUI tools or through command line interface.
Lastly, it highlights Opatch – a patch application tool used by our customers
and standardized across all Oracle products. Really detailed video. Check it
out!

Friday Oct 25, 2013

Just a quick reminder about the FREE virtual developer day focused on WebLogic (and Coherence) coming on November 5th.

This day, with content tailored for developers, will guide you through tooling updates and best practices around creating applications with WebLogic and Coherence as target platforms. We'll also explore advances in how you can manage your build, deploy and ongoing management processes to streamline your application's life cycle. And of course, we'll conclude with some hands-on labs that ensure this isn't all a bunch of made-up stuff - get your hands dirty in the code!

We're offering two tracks for your attendance, though of course you're free to attend any session you wish. The first will be for pure developers with sessions around developing for WebLogic with HTML5, processing live events with Coherence, and looking at development tooling. The second is for developers who are involved in the building and management processes as part of the application life cycle. These sessions focus on using Maven for builds, using Chef and Puppet for configuration and more.

We look forward to seeing you there - don't forget to invite a friend!

Thursday Oct 17, 2013

I had referred to Active
GridLink for RAC in my blog yesterday and since then got several questions on this topic. So I decided to re-visit Active GridLink. With the release of version 11g,
Oracle WebLogic Server started to provide strong support for the Real
Application Clusters (RAC) features in Oracle Database 11g, minimizing database
access time while allowing transparent access to rich pooling management
functions that maximizes both connection performance and availability. WebLogic is the only application
server in the marketplace which has been fully integrated and certified with Oracle Database RAC
11g without losing any rich functionality. Active GridLink provides Fast Connection Failover (FCF), Runtime Connection
Load-Balancing (RCLB), and RAC instance graceful shutdown. With the key
foundation for providing deeper integration with Oracle RAC, this single data
source implementation in Oracle WebLogic Server supports the full and unrestricted
use of database services as the connection target for a data source.

For more
details and to understand how our customer NEC leverages this capability, read
the whitepapers on this topic.

Get in depth ‘how-to’ details from this youtube video from our resident expert, Frances Zhao.

Wednesday Oct 16, 2013

It has been said that a chain is as strong as its weakest
link. Well, this is also true for your application infrastructure. Not only are
the various components that constitute your infrastructure, like database and application
server critical, the integration between these things [whether coming out of
the box from your vendor or done in-house] is paramount. Imagine your database
being down and your application server not knowing about it and as a result
your application waiting indefinitely for a database response – not a great situation
if high availability is critical to your application. Or one of your database
nodes is very busy, but your application server doesn’t have the intelligence
to decipher that – it keeps pinging the busy node when it can in fact get a
response from another idle node much faster. This is what Oracle WebLogic and
Database integration provides: Intelligent integration out of the box. Tight integration between Oracle WebLogic and Database
makes your infrastructure robust enough that not only does each of your
infrastructure component provide you with improved RASP [reliability availability,
scalability, and performance] but these components work together to offer improved
performance & availability, better resource sharing, inherent scalability,
ease of configuration and automated management for your entire infrastructure. Oracle
WebLogic Server is the only application server with this degree of integration
to Oracle Database.

With Oracle WebLogic Server 11g, we introduced Active GridLink
for Real Application Clusters (RAC). In conjunction with Oracle Database, this
powerful software technology simplifies management, increases availability, and
ensures fast connection failover with runtime connection, load balancing and
affinity capabilities. With the release of Oracle Database 12c this summer,
even tighter integration between Oracle WebLogic Server 12c (12.1.2) and Oracle
Database 12c has been achieved and this further optimizes the integration for a
global cloud environment.

Monday Oct 14, 2013

With tight budgets organizations
throughout the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) see the appeal of the open
source model. Open source software (OSS) includes operating systems,
applications, and programs in which the source code is published and made
available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute that
code without paying royalties or fees. Open source “products” typically evolve
through community cooperation among individual programmers as well as very
large companies. An open source license permits anybody in the community to
study, change and distribute the software for free and for any purpose.

At first glance it might seem
that DoD organizations can avoid buying commercial software products simply by
starting with open source software and developing their own applications. As this
white paper shows, total cost of ownership (TCO) for open source software often
exceeds that of commercial software. While minimizing capital expenses by
acquiring “free” open source software is appealing, the up-front cost of any
software endeavor represents only a small fraction of the total outlay over the
lifecycle of ownership and usage. And while cost effectiveness is important, it
must be carefully weighed against mission-effectiveness.

This paper seeks to answer two
questions:

1. What are the tangible and
intangible costs that the government should bear under an open source licensing
model?

2. What are the tradeoffs and
risks associated with open source licensing models in relation to commercially
available software?

Download this whitepaper today
to ensure you are considering the various cost drivers of owning and operating
an application environment.

Friday Oct 11, 2013

This day, focused on developers, will guide you through tooling updates and best practices around creating applications with WebLogic and Coherence as target platforms. We'll also explore advances in how you can manage your build, deploy and ongoing management processes to streamline your application's life cycle. And of course, we'll conclude with some hands-on labs that ensure this isn't all a bunch of made-up stuff - get your hands dirty in the code!

We're offering two tracks for your attendance, though of course you're free to attend any session you wish. The first will be for pure developers with sessions around developing for WebLogic with HTML5, processing live events with Coherence, and looking at development tooling. The second is for developers who are involved in the building and management processes as part of the application life cycle. These sessions focus on using Maven for builds, using Chef and Puppet for configuration and more.

We look forward to seeing you there, and don't forget to invite a friend!

Thursday Oct 03, 2013

Just prior to OpenWorld I wrote about our customer Emerson's Avocent division, the cutting edge work they are doing with their DCIM offering, and Steve Blackwell's sessions at OOW [Read the blog here]. We got lucky and were able to catch Steve live at OpenWorld for an OTN interview in which he offers further details on their Trellis platform, how it leverages Oracle WebLogic Suite, Oracle
Coherence, Oracle Complex Event Processing, Oracle Service Bus and
other Oracle technologies to offer a state-of-the-art platform for their customers.